Tales of romantic high jinks, some too good to be true

Petraeus affair has operatic drama but lacks braggadocio of the stories men usually tell

November 23, 2012|By Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune reporter

This photo features a detail of “The Storytellers of the Decameron” painting by Francesco Podesti (1800-1895). The “Decameron” is a collection of stories by Giovanni Boccaccio. (De Agostini/Getty Images)

Though they had different job descriptions, the after-school gigs of my adolescence came with a common obligation: listening to the boss' sexual bravado.

I could be stacking canned goods on a grocery shelf, making bouquets in a flower shop or running a pencil along a T-square in a design studio. Hovering over me, an employer would spin miraculous tales of romantic conquests. By their telling, nubile young women couldn't resist a fat, balding delicatessen owner, pushing him into a storeroom and ripping off his apron. Other vixens would crawl catlike across a draftsman's table to get at a Lothario who was their grandfathers' age.

Even had I wanted to, I hadn't the wherewithal for a reality check. Sex education wasn't then taught in the classroom but in the schoolyard, that great storehouse of erotic misinformation. But you live and learn, and eventually I relegated those stories to a mental file folder labeled urban legends. Some seemed statistically improbable, like two (or, in some versions, three) women simultaneously demanding to have their way with a Solomonic florist who magnanimously gave a portion of himself to each. Others would have required the body control of a contortionist.

Then I read about an exchange of email love letters between a four-star general and his biographer that included the tantalizing phrase "under a desk." Had I been too hasty in rejecting my old bosses' claims? If hanky-panky might go on beneath a government-issue desk, couldn't there be analogous places for quirky high jinks in civilian life?

Either way, I was hooked on the saga of retired Gen. David Petraeus.

The scenario is like a tragedy set to music by Verdi or Puccini — with a plot so complicated that, though you have read the synopsis before the curtain rises, halfway through the first act you can't keep the characters straight.

The synopsis of an opera based on the scandal could include a description of Jill Kelley given to CNN by an anonymous "senior military official": "She is a bored rich socialite involved with every single senior commander of CENTCOM because she worked as an honorary ambassador."

Concerned by anonymous emails she was receiving from Petraeus biographer Paula Broadwell, Kelley went to an FBI friend — who had emailed Kelley and others a photograph of himself shirtless. As they say, every tragedy needs a comic-relief character.

In the search of computer hard drives that followed, not only did the affair between Petraeus and Broadwell come to light. It also revealed that Gen. John Allen and Kelley exchanged thousands of emails. Some were "flirtatious," according to another of the senior military officials for whom the affair has provided an anonymous bonanza.

So far, the saga is missing one element of those I listened to as an adolescent: the bragging. Even off-based generals wouldn't chance that. Yet I can imagine that still happening. For many males, the ultimate pleasure is in the telling. Perhaps sitting on the porch of an old soldiers' home, one of the generals will say to an attendant: "You want to hear a story?"

Just as the opportunity was put before me by a barber in Florence, Italy. How could I refuse? I was in the hometown of Boccaccio, the author of the "Decameron," a masterpiece of storytelling.

Taking up his scissors and comb, the barber recalled how he'd met a young woman from Scotland spending a college term in Italy. They went out a few times, then she went home.

"Four years later, I'm looking out that window and what do I see?'' the barber said. "The girl, her parents and a little boy."

The woman wanted the boy — their son — to meet his father. Awkwardly, the barber explained that he couldn't bring them home to dinner, being long-since married. But afterward she kept him posted on their child's progress.

"I show you," he said, going out the door. He returned with a stack of photographs a grocer buddy stored for him. They depicted the boy graduating school and university, and sitting behind his desk as the manager of a bank.

A few years ago, the woman called to say their son was to be married and he had to be there. She wouldn't take no for an answer.

He bent the ear of another buddy, who had an idea. The friend was going on a business trip to Paris and had a second ticket of a colleague who couldn't make it. So the barber told his wife there was a free ticket, adding that maybe they could buy one for her — knowing that, as a frugal housewife, she'd decline.

The barber said he took a connecting flight to Scotland. A tuxedo was waiting for him, his measurements having been phoned ahead. The last photograph retrieved from the grocer's showed the three of them — the woman, their son and himself — about to go down the church aisle, just before the barber retraced his steps to Florence.

"What do you think?" he said, pulling off the barber's cloth. "That's a good story, huh?"